Photo by Flickr user Sandy/Scarlett Images
It’s that time of year again, and the Brittain Fellows are reflecting on the year in the rear-view mirror. The value of reflecting on the work we have done is something we emphasize to our students, and yet it is something we often fail to do ourselves. Yet we can all benefit from sitting down to ask ourselves questions like: What went well this semester? What didn’t? What will I do differently next time? What have I learned? As Karen Head, the director of Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, mentioned in her recent interview for TECHStyle, reflecting on the same questions that we ask our students on their final course evaluations and then comparing our own answers can be extremely insightful – do the students see our successes and failures the same way? Does their understanding of the goals and outcomes of the course align with our own?
Reflection, however, should not just cover our teaching, but our achievements in scholarship, our progress on large projects, our work-life balance, and whether we are staying focused on our larger priorities and goals. This semester, four Brittain Fellows are looking back and reflecting on all of these things:
- Sarah Schiff is rounding out a year of posts on the topic of “Myth in the Classroom” (you can read them all here) with her wrap-up: “Myth BEYOND the Classroom”
- In “Thinking Outside the Box by Playing Inside the Box: Games as Texts and Teaching Tools,” Amanda Madden discusses the experiment she tried in her class this semester assigning a video game as a text. Was it a success? Read on to find out!
- Katy Crowther is overwhelmed by the weight of introspection and resorts to bullet points in her “Top Five Things I Learned This Year.”
- And finally, Diane Jakacki reflects on how this past year has brought her to an even greater focus on the things that really matter in “Everybody’s Got Something”
